This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Doctor
Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. It is Super Bowl Sunday.
The game is on. Producer Kayla, are you watching it at all?
Apparently it's tied right now and about to go into ot as the football
people say, oh, t that means overtime. Indeed, you know,
I was watching it earlier with Julio or I mean, I was watching the
commercials, and then when the game would be on, I would look down
at my phone because I don't know how to watch it. I don't understand
the men scrambling around with the whites and the reds and whatever. But I
learned something interesting. I would say, are they supposed to get the ball
across that blue line? And he'd said, well, no, yes,
but they have to get it to that orange line, and then the line
would disappear, and I'd be like, where'd the line go? And he
goes, oh, no, they just super impose that on the screen.
I go, wait, it's an imaginary game. The guys run around and
imagine where the lines are, and he goes, yeah, but they know
where the lines are. I'm like, what kind of game is this where
they just have to the imaginary lines? And I believe mark the first in
the first, second, third, fourth down, So wherever they fell that
they put an imaginary line there so the viewers can know where the game starts
again. I just learned something magical. I heard the word first down,
second down, third down. I never I thought it meant like tries or
goes. It's called because the guy falls down its tackled. I didn't know
that that's why they start again where the other guy falls in his butt,
and then the new one start exactly. I bet Taylor Swift knows more about
football than I do. Well, she'd better she has for sure. Yeah
that's what her mean talk about. Let me tell you, I dated football
players back in the day and they would draw those XO patterns on the paper
for me and show me all the plays and I still didn't get it.
So I don't get it, but I like the commercials. My favorite favorite
one so far was the one for Mayonnaise with Kristin Wig and Pete Davidson with
her little cat becomes so famous because she thinks the cat knows how to read
recipes, but really she's just saying mayonnaise or something. Becomes so famous that
Pete Davison dates her and is on a red rpet with her. I love
that Davidson has a new famous pussy. Do you say that? That's what
he did? It was that little kitty cat pussy. Oh my god,
he said it twice. That's what you call a pussy. Oh my god,
it's a cat, a cat. As did you see Beyonce? She
was trying to break Verizon because she breaks the Internet and breaks the records,
and she was trying to break Verizon. But Verizon so unbreakable that Beyonce's trying
all these things like taiping. It was really cute and also just side note,
Usher was my favorite player of his performance was amazing. Yeah, it
was pretty amazing. All right, So I want to talk about a couple
of things here. I want to talk today about should a parent go to
jail because they didn't get mental health services for their kid? You know what
I'm talking about? That woman in was it Michigan? Minnesota, Michigan.
And I'm going to talk about relationships a little bit like how emotionally available you
are or not? And and later in the show, we got a special
guest, a woman whose own journey using I don't recommend this for people.
I'm just saying she used these ayahuasca and psychedelic drugs to gain access to trauma
in her childhood. It's a very fascinating story. So I've got her a
little later in the show. But first, I'm not watching the clock,
Kayla. Where are we at? I want to get into it. So
in the last two weeks I went through some weird physically. You know,
sometimes physical problems happened, like in clumps. So just before Christmas, I
was climbing a fence with Julia. We climbed a chain link fence. It
was like seven feet tall because we were out hiking and we came up on
a fence and he said, we can go around the fence, but it's
probably another half mile up and around, and I'm like, no, we're
just climbing, honey, I'll be fine. And as I was jumping down
the other side, I clung with my little claws to the chain link and
somehow when I jumped hard, I twisted my shoulder in some weird way.
My shoulder's been like I can unload the dishwasher. I can't do my ploates
is driving me crazy. And then I take a flip and wipeout in my
kitchen. Honestly, I was sitting in my computer. Apparently my foot was
asleep, but I didn't know. I stood up. The whole thing flipped
beneath me and tore all the muscles on the top of my foot. I
mean, I crawled to Urgent Care. Got they didn't X ray, Nope,
not broken. Got the boot and the crutches, and oh my goodness,
my favorite part is you were home alone, Jesse, yelling and just
like that. That's just like that. Craziest thing is that's what came out
of my mouth. And just like that, and just like that, because
I thought my foot was broken, I heard like a pop. Apparently you
hear pop when a muscle pulls to such a random response. Just like that,
my world it changes, right. And then this week I have a
very minor cold. Okay, it's minor, hear me. It's a little
sniffle. I got a little cold. It's just like right there where your
throat connect to your nose, a little post nasal drip enough to keep you
up coffin at night. But I don't feel bad. I'm just got this
ale issue. So it's put me in a funk because I haven't been able
to go to the gym because I have to put on the boot if I
have to walk along across campus where I teach. I teach a cal State
Channel islands in case you don't know, And so I decided to I literally
thought that I did. Elizabeth Koobler Ross's dabda. Do you know what that
is? Dabda? She's the one who sat beside the deathbed of thousands of
people are dying, and she said, we all go through this denial,
anger, bartering, depression, and acceptance, and that applies to any kind
of loss we have in our life. Right, And I really feel like
I went through these stages. Like first I was literally like I'm fine,
I'm gonna take advilla and just walk my foot. And then foot got worse,
of course, denial, right, and then anger, I'm so man,
I can't go to the gym. This is terrible, right, and
then bartering, Okay, God, listen, if you just make my foot
better and my shoulder, then I'm going to be a really good person,
right, barter somehow finally I was in a funk. I was fully depressed.
The rain was happening too. It was a bad thing. And now
I've just accepted. You know, sometimes a bunch of little physical ailments come
in a clump and they will pass. We will get better, right.
But it made me do a little googling and ask the question, what what
psychology says about how we can cope when we have a physical diagnosis. I
did a few of these things. Not all one is connect with others.
I was in a funk because I wasn't talking to my friends. You got
to reach out and get on the phone with your girlfriends, your guy friends.
You got to talk to people, all right. And when I finally
called a girlfriend up and I said, I'm in such a funk, I'm
mad at my foot on my shoulder and I want to do blodies and I
can and she's like, oh, I've so been there. When I put
out my back it was terrible, And so we bonded over that you can
also call your therapist. I did. We had a lovely little conversation.
Here's the important thing. Though. You can do a deep dive on the
internet, WebMD and the sorts, but if you get too much information,
you're going to find yourself ruminating. Like I was literally going which statins cause
muscle weakness? Do I need to get off that statin? Do I need
to get one? Which is the least amount? Right? Before you know
it, you've worked yourself into anxiety and uncertainty. So get some information and
trust your doctors more than the internet. That's really really important. Communicate what
I got started to get out of my funk. I called my doctor a
surprise surprise, and we had a nice little telemedicine appointment. Of course,
she says, you have to do everything in order. We've had the X
ray. Now she wants an MRI. You can't write a script for physical
therapy. Do we do the She just follows the book, which is what
a good doctor does. They follow the book. You got to go into
order. Also practice some mindfulness, some meditation, some yoga. I've been
using this little neuro transmitter thing. It's not a it's a vibrator, not
that kind of vibraty. It's a thing that just calms me down. It's
like an ankle bracelet. I'll tell you about it later. You'll hear about
it, all right, And I also followed very closely the trial of Jennifer
Crumbly. If you don't know who Jennifer Crumbly is, she is the mother
of Ethan Crumbly, the fifteen year old boy who killed four people at his
high school in twenty twenty one in a town in Michigan outside of Detroit Oxford
High School. And the mom was on trial for manslaughter because for all kinds
of reasons, I want to talk and I want to talk about do you
think parents should be put on trial for what their kids do? You're listening
to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty Michigan jury convicted a
school shooter's mother of involuntary manslaughter. That was on Tuesday. Her son killed
four students back in twenty twenty one. His name was Ethan Crumbly. Her
name Jennifer Crumbly. By the way, the husband, people keep saying,
what about the dad, What about that dad. He's going to stand trial
in March, and now that the mom has been convicted of manslaughter. Hmmm,
I'm pretty sure he's going to try to negotiate a plea deal real fast.
It's not going to look good for him. Apparently he was the one
who actually bought the child the gun. This is an interesting trial for me
because it really we know that our mental health and the outcome of our mental
health is partly nature and partly nurture. In other words, there are good
families who come out of that family a serial killer, right because of there's
something genetic that happened, there's something chemical that happened. And then there are
families, when looked at in a courtroom, that seem to have practiced such
neglect and such ignoring of the pleas of their child for help. And in
this case, and by the way, the kid has already been convicted for
life in prison. So I read somewhere that he's only fifteen, but four
children died, so let's not forget that. But I think there's something if
you're a minor in Michigan you can't do. You only have to serve fifteen
years of it or something. I don't know, something like that. But
let's talk about the evidence that this jury convicted this mother on. They had
text messages from Ethan to his mom dating all the way back to twenty sixteen.
That's seven years ago. So the kid was like eight years old.
Is that right? That has my math? Okay? Eight years old.
He was left alone a lot. He was always texting about when you're coming
home. I'm scared. I don't want to be home alone. I'm scared,
and she either would not respond or just say it's okay, or I'm
out celebrating with the ski patrol. In fact, several months before the shooting,
he texted his mother that he was scared at home alone. He was
hearing the toilet flush, doors slam, he saw a light turn on,
and clothes flying off the shelf. He was the only one in the house.
He told his mother that their home was haunted and there were demons in
the house. She texted back, or she actually told the jury this was
a running joke in the family. They used to say the house was haunted.
It was just a funny joke. There were also text messages that he
sent to a friend, many text messages where he talked about seeing ghosts and
other hallucinations. He demonstrated paranoia, feelings of hopelessness, and he said to
his friend that his parents would not get him mental health help. Quote from
a text, I asked my dad to take me to a doctor, but
he gave me some pills and told me to suck it up. My mom
laughed when I told her now. He also left a journal that contained a
very detailed plan about how he's going to cause bloodshed. There were drawings of
guns, please for help regarding his mental health, saying my parents won't listen
to me. They won't help or get me a therapist. Mom's defense was,
I never saw this journal that was in his room. I didn't know
about that then they had for me. The highlight of the trial is apparently
she was really big. The mom was really big into her horses and was
spending like some of like five to ten thousand dollars a month taking care of
these fancy horses. And so the horse lady, the horse border lady was
a witness, and the horse trainer lady said that she always referred to her
son as the oopsie baby. So a few weeks before the rampage, they
bought him a gun as an early Christmas present, and the mom took him
to a shooting range just a few days before. But her claim there was,
well, you know, my husband was more familiar with firearms, and
he's the one responsible for storing that gun. You know when you first hear
parents convicted of manslaughter for a crime their kid did, and you think about
those families that are relatively functional, good parents who raise serial killers because of
you know, bad genes. But then you have this trail. Now you
see the neglect, you hear about the neglect. And here's the worst part
for me. I think the school is partially culpable too, because a math
teacher and another teacher showed drawings to the school counselor and one was him showing
kids on the floor and a gun and blood splatters everywhere and saying, please
help me, someone, please help me. And he so the math teacher,
and I think was an English teacher, didn't like what he was writing
in some of his poems. They called a meeting with the school counselor.
So the school counselor called in the parents. The parents came in. It
was the morning of the shootings. They bring the kid into the office.
The parents are in the office, they talk about how you feel in are
you gonna be okay? And the counselors knew that the kid was often neglected
because they said the councilor's first thing was can you take them home? And
be with him. He doesn't seem safe, and they said, no,
we have to go to work. We have to go to work. We
can't be there and babysit him. So the counselor felt it was safer to
have him at school because the big concern was that he was going to hurt
himself. Right, because he was showing such depression. Three adults in the
room, kids sitting there with a backpack. No one searched his backpack.
The gun was in his backpack at that moment. I know, right,
So, I think this is going to reverberate around the country. I think
that parents are going to think twice before they buy teenagers guns. A friend
of mine said she was visiting some friends in Texas one time and she went
into the house. They were preparing lunch, and she goes, where are
the kids, And she goes, Oh, they're out of the backyard shooting
tin cans. He's twelve and thirteen year old boys just out with their guns
shooting. I'm just like, oh my gosh. We have so many different
ideas about gun ownership, gun usage in this country. It's crazy to try
to even get one unified thought on it. All I know you're I'm asking
the question over and over what should the parents have done? Are they responsible?
I'm gonna answer I feel that they were partially responsible, and what they
should have done. Hey be better parents and be there for them. When
a kid says he's scared being home alone, get someone to be with him.
Don't leave a kid alone they're eight, nine, ten years old.
But then when he's talking about hallucinations and ghosts and stuff like that in the
house, you get them to mental health services. And the last thing you
do is buy him a gun. Not that kid. Ugh. It's heartbreaking
all around, not the least of which, of course, is the families
of the victims who lost kids. One little girl was fourteen years old,
so sad. You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six
forty. You know, when I was doing a lot of dating back in
the day, pre Julio, I used to refer to many, many men
as being emotionally unavailable. This was like the thing we'd throw around about people
emotionally unavailable. Of Course, once I went to graduate school and learned about
psychology, many of those people weren't trying to hurt me or not get close.
They actually just had an avoidant attachment style, meaning that intimacy felt threatening
to them, right, And so as a result, they could talk about
the weather, they could have sex and disappear for a while because all that
intimacy was almost too much for them. But it is possible to learn how
to be more emotionally connected. I talk about emotional intelligence a lot. One
of the conversations that Julio and I have on a regular You know, you
have these conversations all the time with people. Don't A lot of people spend
time talking about each other's behaviors. Why they do that? You wouldn't believe
what happened today. You'll come in and go get this. So as on
a zoom and this guy says, bah blah, get this. I know
when he says get this, he's about to go into a story. Right.
So, when we analyze human behavior, I mean gossip as everybody does.
He will often say, but it doesn't make sense, it's irrational,
it's illogical. Why would they do that? And I say, over and
over, Julio, do you think for a minute that our rational mind is
in charge. It's not. We're not robots. The emotional mind controls all
our behavior, our words, our thoughts, everything. And if you want
to know how big the un conscious is, lay people call it the subconscious,
the unconscious. I want you to picture a photograph of an iceberg.
You've seen them, right, A little tip of the iceberg, the one
that got the Titanic, just above the water, but down below another ninety
percent of that iceberg. That's your unconscious, that's your emotional life. In
fact, the purpose of therapy is to help make the unconscious conscious so that
you can have better control over your wieldy emotions, like why did I say
that? Why did I do that? Right? Emotional intelligence involves sometimes getting
a little closer to you know, some of your childhood stuff that's buried underneath
the surface. But literally it includes this kind of stuff, the ability to
actually identify and describe what you're feeling, but also being able to disc what
other people are feeling. It all starts with you, right, So if
you're not aware of your emotions and the rainbow vocabulary use to express emotions,
then you're gonna have a really hard time identifying them in other people. The
other thing I think emotional intelligence is I kind of like internal backbone where we
recognize our own personal strengths, but we also realize our failings, our limitations,
and that's okay. We still like ourself. You see, people with
self esteem don't think they're perfect. They just know that when they make mistakes,
they know how to make repair. They know how to apologize, they
know how to forgive, they know how to try again or get better,
and they can talk about it. They don't have to be perfect all the
time because they have self confidence. And that's all about learning to accept yourself.
Once you learn to accept yourself better, you'll be able to accept others.
The other thing people with emotional intelligence do is they don't ruminate. They
don't stay on their mistakes. Oh I should have, would have could have?
I wish I could have done that. I wish I could. No,
no, no, they go, ah, I see what was happening
that day. I was overtired, I hadn't eaten breakfast, I got snippy
at my boss. I gotta find a way to make amends now. But
and then you let it go right. You don't say you're a bad employee
or a bad romantic partner or whatever it may be. You let go of
your mistakes because you've learned from them. People with an emotional intelligence tend to
be, in my opinion, curious, especially about other people. Now,
I've been interviewing people from media, for radio, television, whatever, for
oh my gosh, so many decades, I don't want to tell you.
And I used to come in. I used to be very well researched,
read everything I possibly could, and then come in with this perfect little list
of questions. But because of my life experience, now I walk into every
interview with a curious mind. I think to myself, what would my listeners
be asking themselves? Right now? I have empathy for my listener. Why
is it that way? Why is the big question for me too? Why
do they do that? Why is it like that? Right? I'd say
the biggest part of emotional intelligence is, of course, empathy for others.
So how do you learn this stuff? Learn to be responsible with your mistakes,
make amends but let them go. Learn to see other people's feelings and
give words for them, and have empathy. Well, you start through conversation,
meaningful, in depth conversations, And for those who have a kind of
avoided attachment style, it's going to be hard at the beginning. Start small,
I want you to talk about difficult, sensitive things. It's amazing how
many people weren't taught as children to talk about these vulnerable topics. Even if
you can't talk about your feelings, it helps there. It helps to be
there for someone, especially in their bad times and they're good times, because
sometimes you might have big feelings of envy. So you move away from people
when they're having when life is going great, right, so you have to
give your support when they're doing well, but also when they're having a rough
time. Here's a big one. Learn to apologize. The big power words
in any relationship are I'm sorry now. Not if you're a chronic apologizer and
you feel less than and somebody's dominating and controlling and manipulating you, no,
no, no. If you've made a mistake, taking ownership, saying you're
wrong shows that you're an emotionally mature person. And the other thing that's really
important is you respect other people's boundaries. Let the but when they say this
is not what I want or this is not what I like, respect this.
Whether that boundary is a psychological one, whether it's a physical one,
whether they've got their emotional guard up, or whatever. You've got to respect
that respecting others teaches you how to respect yourself. And also, people who
are emotionally intelligent have no problem showing lots of affection. When I met my
Julio, I've never met a man who hugged and held hands as often as
he does. He's literally the most affectionate human I think I've ever met.
And we're just, you know, vibing off each other with lots of dopamine
back and forth, even when days are bad. If you've been somebody who
are raised to not talk about your feelings, I know it's going to be
hard. Start in your most intimate relationships and begin the conversation by saying,
this is really hard for me to talk about. Forgive me if I make
some mistakes and I sound awkward. I want to find a way to share
this with you. That's how you start that conversation, and I wish you
luck. It's hard, but it's all learned. Look at finding love isn't
about luck, It's about skill, and this is the biggest skill, gaining
some emotional intelligence. You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM
six forty. Well, if you care the super Bowl's over, and yeah,
Taylor's boyfriend one uh Kansas City won. The score of final score against
San Francisco was twenty five to twenty two in overtime. And now the thing
that was going to break the internet is is Travis Kelcey going to walk up
to Taylor Swift and propose to her right after the Super Bowl? That's what
the Internet has been saying for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now, if
it's true they only started dating in September, Doctor Wendy's going to say,
that's a little too early, way too early for that, Okay, But
now there's Internet also has a rumor that they are actually se secretly dating for
six months before they were publicly dating. I don't know, the Internet's going
to say, whatever, you know, verifies their feelings at the time,
because before he wouldn't even a lot to rent, or she wouldn't let him
in to see her because she didn't know him. And now they were secretly
dating for months and she just out there, she is jumping up and down.
Look at that icy, spicy girl, nice icy What is her name?
Her name is Ice Spice? Oh icy Spacy? No, just I
just Ice Ice spice. Yeah, I know my daughter Jones, I think
was her for Halloween. Oh yeah, I'm sure she did such a good
job. She's so cute. Yeah, she's so cute. So yeah,
they're very happy, but some people are sad. There you go, uh
so, biggest relationship myths, I'm always surprised that stuff. To me,
that's completely common sense. The rest of the world is still like, come
on, I still believe that myth. So let's talk about some of my
favorite relationship myths that are spinning around our culture. You know, earlier Chris
Merrill brought up one. He said, is it okay to split the check
on the first date? And my answer is somebody needs to show sacrifice,
even if it's a same sex relationship. Whoever does the asking is the host
should do the paying. Now, I remember this gay friend of mine said
that he went out with this guy. They had a really nice dinner.
The guy had asked him out to dinner, and at the end of the
dinner, the guy put his credit card down and my friend said, thanks,
I really enjoyed the dinner. I'll get the next one. And apparently
the next day he called him so mad, saying you need to split checks.
You need to learn how to be a good gay. I'm just like
who's chasing who? Then we want to be able to sacrifice and work for
a mate, no matter the gender. Okay, so don't split the check
on the first aid, folks, never ever, ever, unless it's what
are you brother and sister business associates? No, okay, here's another myth.
The best indicator of love is butterflies in your stomach. Nope, absolutely
not for people actually with an anxious attachment style. That's anxiety and it often
means those butterflies in the stomach that they're marching right back to the scene of
their original attachment jury. So they can't listen to their stomach because their stomach's
not taking them to the right place right. So that is a myth that
if you don't have butterflies in your stomach, you're not in love. Here's
another myth. Men must make more money than women. Okay, ladies,
This myth of getting an alpha male to commit often keeps many women single.
We have an oversupply of successful women in the mating marketplace right now. In
the fertility years, men don't have a fertility window that women do. Now
twenty percent of all humans, no matter their gender, do not biologically reproduce.
That has been consistent through the history of the human species. One in
five women, one in five men do not biologically reproduce. What does that
mean? They are very important alo parents in our tribe. They are aunties
and sisters and cousins and uncles and coaches and teachers and babysitters and employers who
employ parents who feed kids. They help raise the kids in the tribe in
a different way. But what happens with many women is when they surge ahead
in education and their careers, they still have patriarchies swimming around in their head
and they want a guy who makes that much more than them. Well,
there aren't enough of those guys to go around. So if you're going to
keep believing the myth that men must make more money than women, if you
want to become a mother, uh, that fertility window might close before you
get that alpha to settle down. I just gonna say, uh, here's
another one. Sex is a great way to audition a mate. Nope,
In fact, waiting to have sex to see if they'll stay around for a
relationship is a way better way to audition to mate. There's this idea like,
if we don't have instant chemistry, and it's physical chemistry right at the
beginning, we'll never have a healthy relationship. What about building trust? What
about building reliability? Friendship first? Then you can check out the sex.
Here's another relationship myth. Chemistry must be necessary to have a secure relationship.
You know, arranged marriages have a four percent divorce rate. And I know
you think, oh, well, that's because they come from these cultures that
are so patriarchal and women can't leave and they can't make their own No.
You know, in modern Indian culture, where both the kids are doctors and
lawyers, the parents still do the arranged marriage. The big fix up,
Right, Why do arrange marriage only have a four percent divorce rate? Because
there are six people in that marriage, the parents who chose as well,
and so there's lots of people to support that relationship. And you know what
that couple. I was actually talking to a woman this week who is her
parents were Indian immigrants, and she said her parents met on a Thursday,
got married on a Sunday and they've been together, you know, forty five
years. So and I know you're saying, but where they happy. You
know, romantic love doesn't guarantee long term happiness. It guarantees short term fun.
That's about it. Here's another myth that I want everyone to understand.
A short marriage is a failed marriage. Oh my gosh, how often do
I hear that? Oh? You know, that marriage failed? So wait
a sec the marriage has to go. You have to find one soulmate when
you're somewhere in your twenties and keep that soulmate until you die in your eighties.
And that's the only definition of a successful marriage. No, a marriage
is only a failure if you haven't learned anything about yourself, if you haven't
grown. You know, until death to us part was invented, death was
pretty imminent, and many of us, because of our long life expanse we'll
have two or three long stints in monogamy. Those marriages weren't failures. They
were important marriages that you needed to raise kids. And now that job is
done, you've moved on to other goals. That's okay, Caylea, Do
I have time for one more? I want to fit in this last one
because it's so important. Here's one of the biggest miss rolling around our culture
right now. Non monogamy is for most people. No, actually, in
our culture, remember monogamy is partly culturally dictated, but we also organize ourselves
socially around couples. But actually polyamory is only sustainable in about five percent of
people in modern Western cultures. I say, it's all fun and games until
somebody gets hurt, I mean falls in love, you know, and then
the other person gets hurt. That's how it goes. Non Monogamy is not
for most people at this time in our history, in our culture, but
it is for some. So who am I to judge. You've been listening
to Doctor Wendy Wallace. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six
forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app